Word As Bone

Quayside Muroclasm

Quayside Muroclasm: A Sound Derive
Friday 13th October 2006

Weaving and steering abrupt undulations and inept meanderings from. Choosing distractions fashioned from old bits of wrapping and board in an indifferent attempt to follow a mummy in her fair-trade awareness campaign through. Goofish dialogue concerning filters, delays and pitch-shifting, the stuff of local inspector’s banishing of collusion from the ‘home’, waxy grimace his kids’ compromised consolation. Beginner rock wool heads making a fatuous pilgrimage, only to be critiqued by gaily sardonic chavs.

The thing was to do a Wildlife Producer filming, then screen it as part of On The Outside free jazz festival, with Caroline Kraabel as a special appearance. Festival cowboy P Bream had gotten prior to the notion that Caroline did a lot of street with her sax. He also invited Pat Thomas because Pat’s an adventurist and SU10ist and dictaphonist, the time sponsored by accurist will be.

As it turns out Caroline’s approach involves moving about spaces and resonating her alto against/between/through different architectural surfaces/creases/crevices. It’s an exercise in blowing and listening in the same movement, an intense manner of practising the art of collective free appropriation. Her engagement with architectural space, then, was very much akin to the Wildlife Producer aesthetic, but the encounter was potentially problematic within the context of Wildlife Producer’s spectacle for the sake of.

Here’s the programme note for the festival installation at Dance City:

Quayside Muroclasm: A Sound Derive
(Video & installation, 54mins loop, produced and directed by DavidFloat, 2006)

Caroline Kraabel – alto sax
Pat Thomas – SU10 & Walkman
D*Vid JC De La Haye – SP404 & acoustic bass
Gwilly Edmondez – SP404 & TCM20DV Dictaphone

A beautiful Oct morning seized and lovingly manipulated into a means to countering endemic ignorance. Yeay, bother to flick the crass from my gaze, the rust from my lens and dismiss the repression of that arsed flecking you spam. Newcastle is the Venice of the Brazilian imaginary, a haunt that has yielded the fiddly nuts that so frequently poke a hole in your savvy. With the help of special visitors, Wildlife Prod, )prd..prd..prd( used their knowledge of a male-squared Saturday (a bitter misnomer, the original *Paul* would wretch in his creak at the flabby recuperation Christian-belched ritual has had us all guff around) to reclaim the erotic adventure-plate of what can still be a real day. Friday 13th 6 – larkless Voorhees constructed for once boom-proper by McTiernan (Welcome to the party, pal!)

End.
DavidFloat’s film Mini Mini Tour (FTG Studio; 2006) tells it from the start: the four noisers finishing a cup of coffee at the Starbucks opposite Newcastle station, Pat sparking a shard-waft of SU10ery even as we have barely left the seating: the staff’s eyes reflect the bony, residual ignorance. Bleuragghcht!! The film goes on to deliver a real-time account of a would-be derive that winds its way to the Quayside and ultimately the Baltic/Sage patio, ultimately chatting with a couple of cheerful charvers on bikes, mitching from school, with Pat telling them, ‘You should be at school, learning Maths!’

The music on this outing was the worst, by far, that Wildlife Producer had yet tasted. It remains a creative low. The whole thing was rescued by the fact that Float’s film is so good and entirely watchable: its screening on the Saturday evening of the festival was much admired by the gently excited rabble, hobbers who were beering their knobs in the encounter. And maybe that’s the best way. (This despite the latently aggressive tension generated by the arbitrary officiousness of the two pricks who tender the technical needs of Dance City: no, there are good people around, but these two have given up the ghost on their chance to counter the fear within). Anyway - because the film’s content, what the group offers the listening viewer, is constantly awkward and unsettled, the electronic trio following a Kraabel that seeks to dissociate herself from the event at all moments of apparent arrival. And she’s right, of course. D*Vid and Gwilly never get it together, resorting mostly to twisting the knobs on their 404s, demonstrating at once their as-yet unfamiliarity with the kit and their inability to deal with the intensely non-idiomatic vocabulary of Pat Thomas. Kraabel works in ontology and teleology, representing an account of human engagement with first and second natures. Thomas has begun a few spheres beyond, from his years ago, and has never been compelled to compromise a regression to dual exchange. This truth essence of his love action was so breathtakingly enshrined by Kraabel/Brand/Ulher’s crib-crab during the middle session of that Friday’s of the festival, after. It had the clarity of a first and last delicious cigarette. But I’ll try and write about that set another time. I’ll need to travel back to it, literally, to catch the wisp of what it woke in my person.

Thing is about this particular Wildlife Producer outing was its position the little canon as a half-step. Despite what Kane or Meth or anyone else might say, half-steppin’ is a necessity, part of a necessary evolution. To avoid a wrong ‘un is to bow to the rod that ribs the quo. The artist ought to be happy to plunge the good foot firmly into the cheese of plop, wherever it might appear unexpectedly. The careful careerist will evade the embarrassment and pursue the path of sanitary equivalence. ‘I keep my breath smelling like SHIT/So I can get funky…’ What else can ODB have been saying? Sheeit. Because now, Quayside Muroclasm, depicted so stylishly in Mini Mini Tour, the movie, lends a deft shading to the scattered mount of Wildlife Producer’s subsequent endeavours. They probably would have got the whole Paris excursion wrong for a start. Of course they didn’t get it right either – that would have been disastrous.

Look at some video clips: www.myspace.com/wildlifeproducer
Or search exactly for them at www.youtube.com

Wildlife Producer Is A Story Part One

Wildlife Producer is a story. When it began in 2004, Wildlife Producer was supposed to be about architecture and socio-environmental space. A lot of Lefebvre informed it and there was also this idea that it had something to do with skateboarding and graffiti. More than anything it was inspired by the mad, irrational collision of architectures in central Newcastle – partly the legacy of T Dan Smith’s wild ambition.

At first it seemed essential that the films were shot from a tripod, a pocket-size one, to convey this sense of naughtiness, of doing something furtively transgressive. But already at the legendary Starbucks session, the need to change camera angle was obvious. Once we did our first summer 2006 sessions, it suddenly seemed too limiting, the tripod. DavidFloat had been frequently offering to film our sessions, so by the time we started back in September 06, he was part of the team.

One of the most noticeable changes straight off was the way Float’s involvement did away with several ideas and preconceptions. Ideas are limiting, of course. Wildlife Producer was always meant to go beyond improv – by improvising the performance context and the setting each time, it was inevitable that comfort zones would be further dismantled. But the furtiveness of the earlier films was definitely a defining characteristic. Now, with the active observer built in, the openness of the agenda was further exposed. There was never an prescription (set up somewhere and make noise) and there was never a sense that there ought to be content as such – just activity.

Of course that’s all bollocks really. The idea cannot be abandoned, but its primacy can be marginalised. DavidFloat quickly took on a directorial role, choosing settings and making various suggestions. There was only one outing with just D*v and Gwilly before Fletch joined, which was the Monument (with the park tagged on at the end). Typically, Floatsworth’s first challenge to the performers was to set up and play in the busiest spot in town. So that was the first big change – crowd participation. Comments, green and both red, irate buskers coming to appeal to the Producer’s good will and turn it down. No such. But of course that was an issue raised immediately. A simple one, of course: how much less of a right do the samplers of Wildlife Producer have to play in a busy public place than a couple who have very self-consciously done themselves out like some imagined 60s free-livin’s, further polluting the consumerscape with vague-ass, folk-inflected positivity. Harmless and bland.

Consumerscape. Culturescape. Urban equiviscape. Sheepscape. Shitscape. The quiet coach. The setting for Wildlife Producer performances is the human. The social. The fucking gnat!

Fletch’s first session was the Rydale Bridge. Float’s first directed setting. At rush hour, the traffic is constant and fast, whooshing by, no mercy, but no congestion either. That time of day, too, in late September, the light is keen, cutting across, but never mean or unforgiving. The video captures the sense of desperate urgency that fuelled the performance. An urgency that betrays an all-too-obvious lack of necessity, the impertinence of its all: there is virtually no way that a meaningful dialogue can develop between the musicians. D*V and Gwilly were on their SP404s, FX-tweaking to an absurd extent, crush delays, moong reverbs. Fletch was the virtuoso in this set, digging into the circuit board of his SK1 with a pair of screwdrivers, sampling himself shouting ‘Wanker!’ and ‘Bollocks!’ to be spangled at a particular kind of passer-by.

The bridge session was the beginning of Wildlife Producer’s dialogue with disconnection. From that moment on there would never be anything remotely like a fixed agenda. Wildlife Producer is a story. And it will continue to tell a tale of engagement and dissing, a child remorselessly plugging in and unplugging out a Christmas Tree’s worth-per-second of energy like the one you never encountered or even dreamt of. When Fran began her participation in this Beatrix Potter inflected cultural insurrection, she found it to be this way, and that is why the whole thing continues to explode and expand. But that, my mice, is for another instalment. Wait for it.

Everyone Must Make Their Own Kind of Love

Everyone Must Make Their Own Kind Of Love
Wildlife Producer at Tripswitches, Cumberland Arms, Byker, 5th Dec 2006
(Gwilly Edmondez – SP404, dictaphone, voice & dance; DavidFloat – live visuals; Simon Doherty – Casio MT60, voice & AMP; Fletch – bass, amp & crisps; Fran Arnold – charcoal on fabriola; D*Vid De La Haye – absent on this occasion due to other commitments)

‘But was it just The Gwilly Edmondez show?’ Wildlife Producer seeks to afford itself the opportunity to occupy any available cultural context. So it’s film; so it’s video installation; so it’s telly; so it’s a band; it’s content, it’s form; it’s Celine for the eyes, Stewart Burrows for the poorer. Castle to Castle Bryan Ferry. You see it’s millions of people among which are the celebrated in gradations. Acceptance and acceptability. You act like you think you’re normal because your flat’s a mess and you took off your shoes and there’s a half-finished spindle of CD-Rs on your cheapo deskette. What does the world want? But you’ve accepted your acceptance because what you were doing all along was acceptable. You accepted growing up in Belfast where your piano teacher stubbed out fags on you. You accepted, but Jamie Thompson didn’t. That’s why he’ll continue to cut the surface of the possible, reach in and tug till the tendons come loose, spawning deeply sensual diagrams of dark, sinister violence. Music and the Dark Self.

Accepting your acceptance meant that you were ready to slip on the garment of equivalence rancidly goaded you. Fort ratio. Friends, colleagues, associates, people keeping from tearing each other’s eyes out by dealing in prefabrication. I love that you dress.

So Wildlife Producer can’t just turn up and play a gig, as if a band. Don’t you see? The whole thing is about spectacle for the sake of it. Where there weren’t any marks yet, Wildlife Producer will make some. Generating difference as distraction. There is a continuum that is so often inhabited by equivalence. Wildlife Producer kidnaps the continuum and paints it the opposite colour so it can never re-assimilate.

At the Cumberland gig a new and unexpected dynamic emerged, one that the Paris sessions hinted at. Unexpected and new within the discursive context that the artists themselves normally inhabit – an epistemological encounter with collective free improv and freely experimental composition. The dynamic: group performance that requires a central performer to act in a manner disconnected from the collective, undemocratically forging ahead, like a bad Shinto spirit, a megalomaniac shaman. The group ties its energies to the soloist’s back and scrubs it. The fact that key points in the music’s narrative are instigated by crate-digging dancer’s frenzy is irrelevant. Which is precisely how rock and roll has always worked. So maybe the implied protocols of free improv are just bland representational utopianism. Maybe Wildlife Producer are purveyors of material radical subjectivity. Gwilly’s manic selfism doesn’t cow the others into morose, stoic and resentful submission, but challenges their own subjectivity to afford the same degree of radicalism. And you can hear this and you can see it. Fletch and Doherty smirk at the pomposity of the spectacle while spraying their tags in yeah face. D*vid does as ever – places noise and music on its ledges and into its crooks. And Fran visualises the energy in as directly and material a way imaginable.